French writer. Illegitimate girl of the count Gaspard of Vichy, brother of the marchioness of Deffand, and the countess of Albon, Julie de Lespinasse was raised by her mother who, to the old woman of her death, entrusted it to the count and to the countess of Vichy.
In 1754, it became the lady's companion of Mrs. of Deffand, which introduced it into the medium of the Parisian society lives by making of it the reader of its living room. The young girl was not long in gaining the regard of the circle of friends of Mrs. of Deffand where its quickness of mind and its brilliant intelligence were immediately noticed and appreciated. Jealous of success of its protected, Mrs. of Deffand held it away from her meetings before definitively dismissing it in 1763.
Julie de Lespinasse opened then, street of Bellechasse, her own living room which, although more modest than the precedent, attracted the most brilliant philosophers (of Alembert, Condillac, Marmontel, Condorcet, Turgot) and became an important hearth of the movement encyclopedist. Courted by Alembert, it directed its regard towards two other men, the marquis de Mora and the count de Guibert. The failure of these two impassioned connections deeply deteriorated the health of the young woman who gave up herself with despair and died one year after having learned the marriage from its second lover.
Some transfer in its inflamed temperament and the violence of its feelings the harbingers of the tendencies of the romanticism. Its correspondence ignited with the count de Guibert was published in 1809 and constitutes an invaluable document over its time.